There is no work-life balance, unnecessary Zoom meetings with no clear agendas, performative DEI, racism, tokenism, and micromanagement by campaign directors. Ad Council is largely a culture of white women. I believe that many (not all) pretend to care about social impact, but in reality they exploit the real-life struggles of BIPOC people just to win advertising awards and grow their careers. Whether the Ad Council's work is really doing any good or not in terms of addressing systemic problems is highly questionable. The organization also tries to make corporate partners like Amazon and Walmart appear more socially responsible, despite these companies' horrendous business practices and unethical treatment of their employees. Ad Council is actively hiring BIPOC individuals to achieve their DEI goals, but their cultural infrastructure is nowhere near ready. You'll walk into an environment that will quickly feel exhausting and exploitative. The creative concepts you will be tasked with reviewing and marketing from outside agencies will often feel performative, culturally insensitive, and triggering. Executives will not listen to your feedback or lived experiences, and will move forward with these harmful creative ideas because their loyalty lies with their Board Members and the largely white pro-bono ad agencies. It's a very catty and political office culture where things you share in confidence with managers will be quickly spread via Slack and other channels and will be used to serve whatever agendas they're after (e.g, pitting people of color against each other, and so many other kinds of divisive power plays).
